Category Archives: Motherhood

Fate, not fatal

06 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by in cancer, weirder than I thought, Motherhood

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Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don’t always like.              Lemony Snicket

Hi, I’m back. Whatcha been doing the last five years? Well, this and that, where do I start? I’ll just say life is good.

Hey, funny thing, I’d been noodling how fun it would be to have something interesting to write about and fate plopped my breast cancer diagnosis into my lap on May 6. Luckily I caught it early (stage II) and the prognosis is excellent. There were many, many tests in the following weeks and I am happy to report that I have been scanned every which way and upside down and there is NO sign of cancer other than the one pesky tumor.

I feel very good and confident in my medical oncology team and am ready to get going. Initially we were told that chemo might start as early as May 13, but some tardy test results (and the insurance company) made sure that the process would progress more slowly. Treatment began on Friday, May 27. So, I was thankful to be able to enjoy the end-of-school activities, volleyball playoff games and graduation before we got started. (By the way, graduation was May 25 but the grad announcements are somehow still on our dining room table… let’s all pretend that if life was normal around here, the envelopes would have been sent on time…)

The fine print: Treatment can include but is not limited to chemo two weeks apart for four cycles, followed by a different chemo drug once a week for 12 weeks. This should cause shrinkage (the good kind) and potentially make the surgery easier. Expecting surgery in early November; Santa will bring me some radiation for Christmas, and we will round the corner into the new year in good health! That is the plan.

I’ll admit, I have felt overwhelmed by the shock and awe of this unexpected detour but also with the outpouring of love from so many directions. Thank you everyone for your positive thoughts and prayers. I feel very lucky

the Gift

24 Monday Jan 2011

Posted by in Motherhood, seasons, Writing

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Posted 2011.

I was given an unexpected gift.  I was able to turn back the clock, on a snowy day in January.  I was able to live an experience that I’ve regretted missing the first time, and thought was gone forever.  A writer can rewrite chapters, but who has that luxury in life?

I often feel a bittersweet-ness as my kids grow up — the wonder of seeing both boys become functioning future citizens, and the simultaneous mourning of the little boy days left behind.  The days of toys and picture books.  The days of trains.

The Professor was the one who lived and breathed trains, from age two until what we can now refer to as the Unfortunate Nascar Years.  Trains, every day– the first thing he talked about in the morning and last thing discussed at night.  When he first learned his dad was an engineer, his excitement surely stemmed from the belief that Dad drove the trains.

The Little One’s interest in trains seemed to stem more from the need to do whatever his older brother did, and then the thrill of systematically destroying his brother’s meticulously crafted layouts.  I remember little of the days we can now refer to as the The Dark Years, when each day seemingly ended in wailing and gnashing of teeth in biblical proportions.  Granted, this only lasted from approximately 2001 – 2006, which if you do the math is… well, many, many days where I knew I should feel grateful for the priceless opportunity to be a full-time mom, but I often didn’t.  I wished many of those days away.  If I published a memoir of journal entries from that time, the volume would serve as an excellent form of birth control.

It is entirely possible that I never played trains with The Little One for more than 10 minutes in all those years.  He was such a Pocket Nazi during his formative train-playing days that I would lose my temper with him often, and have to remove myself from the situation before I went all out and lost my mind.  I loved that kid fiercely, but let’s just say I frequently needed to count backwards from 100.  Thousand.  I’ll leave it at that.

I thought about the trains, and many of their old toys, just last week when we cleaned the entire house in preparation for guests.  As we piled toys onto basement shelves and closets, it became clear that a thorough sweep of the Basement Land of Misfit Toys is long overdue.  He kept saying “Ooooh, I remember THAT!” and wanting to take things out while I was putting them in.  He’s a tween, half demanding to be grown-up NOW, and half still a little boy.  Someday soon we will purge the toys that they have not played with in years, I thought to myself, with a twinge of… something, undefined.

Then, during yet another snow day home from school, The Little Man unexpectedly carried the impossibly heavy bin of wooden trains upstairs — the old, well-worn Thomas trains and bridges and tracks – and he looked at me.  Without a word, we went together into the den and we played trains on the floor.  Together.  I had so much fun, and he did too. We took a picture of the final creation.  I think I’ll frame it in a double frame, with an old picture I have of him, “Colezilla”, stomping through a huge train layout with a look of devilish glee.

In those old days, I never had the patience.  I was always too busy trying to find time to be me.  Now I was given the incredible gift of a do-over.  A mulligan of motherhood.  And I treasured every minute.

Becoming a writer was just a dream back then.  I saw many women were able to combine motherhood and writing very successfully;  I had not yet reached that chapter, in those years.  Today I have the space to write, and play, on a magical, snowglobe-y day.

those Fabulous Bicker Boys

30 Monday Aug 2010

Posted by in get along like cats and dogs, Motherhood

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It’s quiet around here…  maybe a little too quiet.

The cats have gradually come out of hiding, casting furtive glances around the room, listening carefully for the boys that had just recently been jumping out of the woodwork with Nerf “guns”.  I was repeatedly assured that no one was aiming at the cats, however I can speak from experience that the sensation of nerf darts whizzing past one’s ears is disconcerting at best.  I can only imagine how much it freaks out a cat.  Especially Meep, who is not quite sure how she feels about her own shadow.

I am thankful that these crazy kids are still very entertained and amused by spongey ammunition, truly one of the simpler pleasures of life.  And for some reason, they argue less when they are shooting each other.  I don’t care that the basement is redecorated in Early Pillow Fort Bunker.  Technology is great, but you just can’t run around the house and leap out from behind couches to ambush someone while brandishing a cell phone.

Anyway, the cats have cautiously ventured out and are settling back into naps on the now-quiet boys’ beds.

The dog is wearing a look somewhere between boredom and relief.

I have much more uninterrupted writing time.

The Fabulous Bicker Brothers, exit stage left, boarding the bus.  A  new year has begun.  And yep, you guessed it, I miss them.

the home stretch

23 Monday Aug 2010

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… it’s the final kick, digging deep, rounding the bases and heading for home alone.

The school supplies are packed, the backpacks bulging with loose-leaf paper and expectations.  The boys have new clothes, new shoes (cue foreshadowing music here) and shaggy haircuts, but two out of three ain’t bad.  This has been the happiest summer I have ever spent with the boys, but it is time.  My master plan — to make the last couple weeks as painfully dull as possible — has produced the desired result: they are looking forward to school.

Inaction as action is one of my favorite strategies.

One is off to junior high, and one to the top of the elementary school food chain; already I can see that this year will have its share of life lessons.  I am steeling myself and hoping for minimal wailing and gnashing of teeth.  The Little One is kicking off the life lesson parade with his first major purchase, one he may regret, or love.  Time will tell.

That Little One, he is, well, let’s just say he is frugal with his own money.  He takes great pride in his sizeable savings of birthday money and holiday cash, his two previous sole sources of income.  (Other than those few years long ago when he agreed to pick up the dog poo for $0.25 per pile, which was a deal too good to last once he grew more wise to the ways of the world.  I am only slightly ashamed — that may go down as the greatest scam I ever pulled off as a parent.)

Recently, he came to me with an offer I could not refuse:  he volunteered to clean the litterbox and feed the cats every day in exchange for an allowance.  Now, both kids are expected to do regular chores around the house as part of being a family.  An allowance came recently for the Professor to give him both greater responsibility and freedom. The Little One would receive the same privilege at the same age.

But the cat box?  This offer showed great initiative I thought, and bravery.   Plus, in the grand division of labor that is Every Marriage, cleaning the litterbox was one of my tasks so I was more than happy to pawn it off.  The kid offered for goodness sake, who was I to crush his entrepreneurial spirit?

So he scooped and bagged and cleaned and fed, and collected his cash.

“Wow, I inspire hard work,” I thought to myself with satisfaction.

Not too many weeks later, The Little One came to me with a request for new shoes for school.  Keep in mind, we have taken great pride that neither boy has ever been the kind to beg for the latest toy or clothes or… shoes.  No ipad, or iphone, or other i-thingy, no cell phone, or PSP.  New, clean shoes for school — reasonable enough.  But this kid, this time, was not interested in regular ole’ shoes — this was the first ever request for Special Shoes, the kind that are advertised every seven minutes during every major televised sporting event, the ones with snazzy new features that are “like an energy drink for your feet”.

For the price of these shoes?  The energy drink should also wash those feet.

Hmmm, looked like a life lesson to me.  I told him I would pay the amount of a typical pair of school shoes, and he would have to pay for the rest.  Tightwad that he is, that would put an end to this nonsense.

I underestimated the fortitude of a tween.

So he bought these shoes — we had to order them online because no local store carried his size — and he handed me the wad of cash right after I pushed the “Submit Order” button on the website.  Now he waits for The Shoes to arrive.

Will the shoes even be comfortable?  Will he regret this purchase, and be filled with buyer’s remorse?  Will the shoes still fit pubescent feet three months from now?  These are not my problems, I have to keep reminding myself.  Will he wear them proudly with a new (highly energized) spring in his step?  I will soon find out.  I offered him my advice and guidance, and let him make the decision.  I figure a lesson in spending is worth the price.  And, I no longer needed to go the ATM that day.

One lesson that can’t be jammed into the backpack, and they have not even left home yet.  (Can anyone else hear the wheels on the bus go ’round and ’round?)

reality check on the prairie

17 Tuesday Aug 2010

Posted by in Motherhood, something important, I'm sure

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I am ready to let go of the dream that either of my children will ever read the complete boxed set of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s  Little House on the Prairie — yes, I mean the collection that I purchased before they were born and had planned to read aloud to them while they played quietly with solid wooden toys.

letters to camp

15 Sunday Aug 2010

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This summer, The Little One went to his first-ever overnight camp, five nights in a cabin in the woods.  Swimming, archery, campfires, horseback riding, night hikes with the fireflies — this was the real deal, just as I always imagined camp would look like, based on the book settings and movie locations and my imagination.

Since he was a first time Camper, I was the corresponding first time Camper Mom.  I had a lot of questions.  I knew I could be very brave.  I read all the camper instructions on the website, packed the five t-shirts and five pairs of shorts, the bug spray and sunscreen, and labeled everything as he packed it into his stuffed duffel.

The website said no calls and no visits all week, but we could write letters to our camper if we wanted.  To have the letters delivered each day, they suggested we label each envelope with the day of week, and drop off all the letters at the camp office on Sunday.

This presented a bit of a challenge, since it is harder to write newsy, interesting accounts of family events at home that have not yet actually happened.  So I did what any self-respecting mother would do, and made everything up.

One the eve of his departure, the boy’s biggest concern was not that he knew no one there, or the scary camp mashed potatoes, or snakes, or thunderstorms — his greatest fear was that his brother would have fun at home without him.

Normally this would be the perfect setup for that special kind of torture that makes parenting worthwhile, but I was already missing the little bugger and he had not even left yet.  Plus, I knew that deep down, he was terrified of being homesick.  So instead, I sat down on that Sunday morning with the yellow notebook pad and wrote all about our week at home, the days of tedium and torture, long days that were NO FUN AT ALL without him:

Monday:  begin knitting lessons for his brother.  Lose satellite reception and have to resort to reading the dictionary out loud to pass the hours of mind-numbing boredom.  Read and read and read until we make it all the way to the letter D.  Watch the grass grow. Hope you are having more fun than we are.

Tuesday:  Continue to read the dictionary out loud, continuing late into the evening to make it to letter M.  More knitting for your brother, as he tries to finish the sleeves.  This is after he has to brush the dog’s teeth with the squirrel-flavored toothpaste.

Wednesday:  Celebrate reaching the letter R in the dictionary by eating only foods that begin with R all day: rhubarb, rutabagas, radishes — and that was just breakfast.  Your brother has resorted to cleaning the litterbox with the dog’s toothbrush just for fun because he cannot find anything else to do.

Thursday:  after many hours of knitting, the sweater your brother is making for you did not “turn out right”. Maybe we can use it as a potholder instead.  We finished the dictionary last night and we do not want to talk about how many hours it took.

Friday:  Can’t wait to see you tonight!

We picked him up Friday night.  He had the most exciting week of his life.  He looked older, more confident.  And he looked torn when we walked up, a simultaneous “I don’t ever want to leave this place”,  and “I can’t wait to get back home.”  He had been homesick, but he was brave.  And, it turns out, after the emotional roller coaster of independence and activity, the unfamiliar and the fun, he was so mentally fried that he believed all the letters I had written were real accounts of life at home, that all the newsy news I shared had indeed happened.

I felt a little guilty, but only for a moment.  The end almost certainly justifies the means, not to mention that lying to my kids has been the cornerstone of my publishing credits.  Perhaps the news of his brother’s boredom had soothed his soul during the dark hours of the night.  I think the letters did make him smile, because he saved them and brought them home, damp and crumpled much like all the possessions that made it back into the duffel.

Because I had a large pile of unopened mail on the counter for days, I found the  letter he wrote to us FROM camp long after he returned.  He did not even remember writing it.

The note was sweet, written with a stubby pencil on the writing desk of his knee, slightly self-conscious and clearly trying hard to not think about being homesick.  He wrote that the food was good and camp was fun.  Then he signed it with his full signature, in case we were confused about which kid had not been home all week.

Like I had not been sneaking into his room while he was gone and laying my head on his pillow to breathe the lingering still-sweet smell of little boy.

Oops.  Did I write that out loud?

I missed him an embarrassingly ridiculous amount, which of course made this an invaluable experience for all involved.  He had a great week.  Separation is good, and reunions are so sweet.

summer forecasts

02 Monday Aug 2010

Posted by in Motherhood, seasons

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“Hello friends,” says a wee voice from somewhere off the face of the earth.

~

Here I am, alive and kicking, sweating and bitching about the heat, and gratefully enjoying this summer with my boys more than any other summer season on record.  There have been notable highs, seasonable lows, with scattered life lessons and only a 20% chance of irritability on any given day.  Not bad, overall.

A Summer Recap:

June:  always my motherly month of endless possibilities and ambitious plans.  I will take the boys to many culturally enriching events.  We will eat balanced meals (three of them) each day.  What fun we will have, planning our menus and grocery shopping together, skipping down the aisles and the youngest will not crash the cart this time — oh, no, not this summer! — because we are going to have a grand time.  I will lovingly help The Little One stay fresh on his homework skills by doing worksheets each day, and I will review them and put smiley face stickers on them and he will look up at me with grateful brown eyes, content in the knowledge that his school year will have such a smooth start…

*Will someone just go ahead and cue the foreboding music already so we can end this fantasy passage???*

June is so full of hope. And, camps.  Camps keep people busy (and gone).  Gone is good.

July:  Oh, July, you prankster, by now I know all your sneaky games —  the sunshine that looks bright and sparkly until I open the door and the wave of humidity hits like a slap on the face, a punch in the stomach, and many more similes I need not mention;  the pre-vacation preparation and corresponding post-vacation fun hangover, no, you will not catch me by surprise — not this year! — We will go to the nice, cool library every week and check out books and frolic (very quietly) through the stacks and come home and read together in the nice, extremely air-conditioned house.  And then I will make the children go outside and run around.

July is so full of reality.  And mosquito bites.  And that nameless feeling that time is passing too slow, yet somehow much, much too fast, all at the same time.

So, here we are at August.  I will hazard a forecast that we will shop for that looonnnnngg list of school supplies, and early, before all the composition notebooks are sold out.  (Really, retailers, there are 18,000 kids in this school district — could you stock up on the composition notebooks?  We will need 36,000 of them.  Thanks in advance.) We will have purchased shoes that fit, prior to the night before the first day of school.  We will play another 37 games of Trouble, make more juice popsicles, camp in the living room, go out for ice cream, splash in the pool, and somewhere in between we can pull an all-nighter of math worksheets.

Summer is looking good.

Proudest Moments

14 Friday May 2010

Posted by in Motherhood, Writing

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One person’s humor can be another person’s yawn.  One person’s proud can be someone else’s embarrassment.  On either side of the fence, I find that most things in life are not as they appear on the surface, because there exists the chapters before and the chapters not yet written, and all we see is a snapshot.

Profound?  Maybe.  Prophetic?  Confirmed.  Pedantic?  That’s your call.

(Forgive my lack of an obvious segue here — hang with me),  I recently completed a writing course with author Christina Katz called Writing and Publishing the Short Stuff.  I want to make some money as a freelancer, with a side benefit of feeling more comfortable calling myself a writer when I have more clips.  I know, I know, it is not necessary to be published to be a true writer, but truthfully there is some ego involved.  And freelancing is my next challenge.

The class was a fantastic experience — a wealth of information on writing list articles, how-to pieces, fillers, tips, cover letters and much more.  Most importantly for me, it was a kick in the pants.  I willingly signed up for a kick in the pants and I am so glad I did.

I have been following Christina’s blog and reading her newsletters for over a year.  I own two of her books, and am ready to purchase the third.  I respect her advice.  But it was one of her most recent posts that touched me more deeply, one where she asked “writer mamas” to share their Proudest Moments.  I think it is a great read whether you are a writer, a mama, both or neither.

After reading story after story, here is what I chose to share in this on-line conversation about pride.  Because I am still a self-handicapping procrastinator budding deadline embracer, my contribution is in the comments section (umm, missed the cut-off):

This collection of Proudest Writer Mama moments left my heart on my throat. I am so touched by these stories of accomplishments, ones that society may consider large or small, but are each huge to all of us that have this goal. Thank you Christina for inspiring each of these writers to post these experiences, and to each writer for sharing the private insight into their dreams.

My proudest moment came the day I received my copy of the anthology “ The Ultimate Mom“, in 2009. My essay “The Impromptu Birthday” was my first published piece, and was not just a shot-in-the-arm of confidence, but really the I.V. drip that kept me going through my self-doubts. I held that book in my hands with the late afternoon sun streaming in the windows, looked at my name in print and smelled the pages as I let them riffle. Then I looked at the mountain of dirty laundry in the dining room and the sink-full of dirty dishes still left from breakfast, (and quite possibly the previous night’s dinner) — and felt a sense of accomplishment, a quiet peace that after many years and multiple careers, I had finally found what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Subsequently, things started hopping. I appeared twice as a guest blogger on Jane Friedman’s Writer’s Digest blog “There Are No Rules“, was invited to do a radio interview about my story, did a book signing at my local Barnes & Noble (did you know you could do a book signing by being a contributor to an anthology? I didn’t!) and most recently appeared very briefly on CBS Sunday Morning as an attendee at the Erma Bombeck Humor Writers’ Workshop. No matter that my published story of motherhood is about poo and lying to my kid to accelerate the potty training process; the radio interview was broadcast from a nursing home-based radio station with a broadcast range of approximately five miles; at the book signing I sold 11 copies, with eight of those purchased by my friends; and on my seven second stint on national TV, I inadvertently uttered the words “incontinence problem” and “recovering valedictorian”. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, that lots of things in life sound far more impressive to others until they know the details.

But I am proud of these moments, even though a disturbing number of them involve bodily functions. The real pride blooms from this: each and every time, I had pushed myself far beyond the edge of my comfort zone, and laid myself bare with as much authenticity as I could bear.

…it is that same authenticity that I feel in these Writer Mama stories. We can all feel proud.

Other than being a mom, my best job ever, nothing has been as personally fulfilling as being a writer.  Wife, daughter, sister and friend are treasured roles…  and in all these areas, I have been unbelievably blessed.  But, writing?  I can hardly wait to see what happens next, (and it will not be the missing component of the body function trifecta, I promise).

Life is funny, or why I started screaming at the TV

10 Monday May 2010

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Have I mentioned before that life is funny?  It bears mentioning again, because it is the only explanation I have for why my Mother’s Day included blood-curdling screams.

Like most of my adventures, this one started out innocently enough.  As I have mentioned 53 times already, I attended a writing conference a few weeks ago.  By chance, CBS Sunday Morning was also at the event, filming a segment for Mother’s Day about Erma and how her humor helped revolutionize the way America viewed the career of Motherhood.  Tracy Beckerman, humor columnist, blogger, conference speaker, and author of the book Rebel Without a Minivan, was on deck as a feature interview for the show.  Tracy is smart and funny, and she signed my copy of her book even though I do drive a minivan, and I once commented on her blog “Lost in Suburbia”, and we are friends on Facebook, so really I’m almost a real friend,  stalker,  quasi-acquaintance, so I tuned in to see her (and, truth be told) to try to catch a glimpse of my aforementioned disastrous haircut from behind, somewhere in the crowd.

The TV cameras were around every day, filming many, many hours of mingling attendees and numerous workshop sessions.  No biggie, until they popped up in a session where I stood up and shared some very personal information as part of writing exercise on our greatest fears and most embarrassing moments.*

*A lethal combination.

I felt rattled to have a camera in my face while speaking, but was reassured that with 350 attendees, many speakers and an estimated 147 hours of raw video footage, I need not give it another thought.

So, fast forward to 9:00 Mother’s Day morning, and I know the show is on but I have recorded it on the DVR so I would not interrupt the family making a fuss over me early on my day. Watching Tracy would be fun, but I knew the enthusiasm for showering me with gifts and cards would too soon come to an end, so I wanted to savor it.  Indeed, my guys gave me a wonderful day.

As the fawning masses were running out of steam later in the late afternoon, I settled in and cranked up the DVR.  The segment was a sweet piece about Erma and motherhood, with fun interviews of her kids.  It included cute little cross-stitch segment transitions of Erma quotes, such as “Insanity is hereditary — you get it from your kids.”  Fade that first cross-stitch, and there is my face.

I found this shocking.  I started screaming.  I don’t know why.  It was so not cool.  I bet Tracy did not scream at the TV.  I was on the screen for five seconds, and said one sentence.

The Little One came rushing up the basement stairs to see if I was being murdered — apparently seeing myself on TV when I don’t expect to see myself on TV makes me emit a blood-curdling type of scream.  We didn’t know that about me, but now we do, for future reference.

It is a good thing to know, because life is funny.

Why Erma?

20 Tuesday Apr 2010

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“Why Erma?” someone asked.

Erma Bombeck was the first humor writer that I ever read.  As a kid, when I had exhausted the stack of books from the summer bookmobile, I would browse through the house for reading material.  There on the living room bookshelf, near the Reader’s Digest Condensed versions and the set of encyclopedias, stood several Erma books in various stages of dogearedness.  The paperback that stands out in my mind is “The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank.”  I used to think the title meant something like “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence”, but later, as I contemplated the uncanny ability of septic tanks to either green up a lawn in no time, or kill the grass completely, the title had great depth.

Or it is entirely possible that I over-thought that book title.  I had a lot of time on my hands.

To me, the wonder of her humor is this:  I was a 10 year old kid who had never lived in a suburb.  Erma’s world of grown-up responsibilities and tedium and frustrations and joys — that was not my world.  Yet her situations were so comically real and her descriptions so universal that somehow I understood how she felt.  And I would laugh out loud.

I forgot about Erma for many years.  Then, staying in a vacation house on Marco Island, I found a bookshelf filled with an eclectic mix of titles, the kind of collection that grows from people leaving a book and taking a book as they come and go.  I spotted Erma there on the shelf and started to read, and I laughed out loud.  I watched my own kids race around and bicker and joke and I saw my family, and I smiled.

A recent comment from the wonderful writer Darrelyn Saloom sums it up for me:

…I adore Erma Bombeck. Her column and books were a housewife’s drug before anti-depressants. I never needed ‘em. I had Erma to fire up those synapses in my brain.

As I listened to writer after writer share their stories at the conference, women and men, I heard so many experiences that mirrored my own.  As children themselves, they also related to her humor.  And here I thought I was the only pre-tween who found these books funny even though the setting was on another planet.

Yet, funny or not, I must admit that Erma’s world in a suburb of Dayton, Ohio served as a cautionary tale to me as a kid.  I had no aspirations to be a Midwestern housewife, or a stay at home mom.  In fact, I spent a long time running in the opposite direction.  But, as I learned from reading Erma’s stories long ago,  life is funny.  The winding paths of the years can even land an unsuspecting girl in suburban southwestern Ohio, not 30 miles from where Erma’s septic tank was fertilizing the lawn as she raised a couple kids.  I have found myself in an unforeseen life, one I never dreamed could make me happy.

But this life does make me happy.  Thanks, Erma, for finding the funny in everyday situations, and sharing the stories.  Now I can see that being a mom can be the most noble profession of all.  Even in the ‘burbs.  Writing about it sounds good too.